“‘_You_ pay duty—a thousand, two thousand dollars!’ she gasped at me, still keeping her eyes on the stone, flashing there in the light. ‘Given to you,’ she almost hissed, ‘by some loving father whose child you guided into the paths of wisdom? Oh, I know you, you lying huzzy! It’s mine!’ she cried, like a baby crying for the moon, ‘it’s mine! You—you stole it from me!’” She paused, at the memory of the scene, and Durkin stirred uneasily on the seat. “What made the fool say that?” he demanded. “Why, she meant that she could claim it, and intended to claim it, insinuating that she would see that it was declared at the wharf, if I kept it, and arguing that I might as well lose it quietly to _her_, as to the Treasury officers. I knew in a flash, then, that she didn’t know what the Blue Pear was. I closed the little gun-metal case with a snap. Then I put it, Blue Pear and all, in her hand. She turned white, and asked me what I meant. “‘I am going to give it to you—for a while, at least,’ I said, as coolly as I could, making a virtue, of course, of what I knew was going to be a necessity. “She looked at me open-mouthed. Then she tore open the case, looked at the stone, weighed it in her fingers, gasped a little, held it to the light again, and turned and looked at me still once more. “‘This pendant _was_ stolen!’ she cried, with sudden conviction. She looked at the stone again—she couldn’t resist it. “‘You might call it the Robin’s Egg, when you have it re-cut,’ I told her. “She gave a jump—that was what she was thinking of, the shrewd old wretch. She shoved the case down in her lean old breast. “‘Then you will smuggle it in for me?’ I asked her. “‘Yes, I’ll get it through, if I have to swallow it!’ “‘And you will keep it?’ I asked; and I laughed, I don’t know why. “‘You remember my house?’ she cried, with a start. “‘Like a book!’ I told her. “‘But still I’ll keep it!’ she declared. “It was a challenge, a silly challenge, but I felt at that moment that this was indeed a plunge back into the old ways of life. But, to go on. She didn’t seem to realize that keeping the Blue Pear was like trying to conceal a white elephant, or attempting to hide away a Sierra Nevada mountain. Then that cruel old avaricious, over-dressed, natural-born criminal had her turn at laughing, a little hysterically, I think. And, for a minute or two, I felt that all the world had gone mad, that we were only two gray gibbering ghosts talking in the enigmas of insanity, penned up in throbbing cages of white enamelled iron.